On my first day at seminary, I met my husband in the cafeteria.  We were married a year and a half later.  What I remember about our first meeting was my husband's long, black hair tucked neatly under his New York Yankees baseball cap.  The bits and pieces of our first conversation have faded quite a bit.  I do remember as we dined on institutional fare that we spoke of our favorite movies, places we had visited, and our plans after seminary.  I learned enough about my future husband that night to know I liked him, and I hoped I would be able to dine with him again—preferably over better food. 

On that night, sixteen years ago, I received but a glimpse into the man who would become my husband.  But real knowledge—really knowing him—has been an unfolding process over these years we have shared together.  Certainly, learning facts about my husband helped me to get to know him, but facts about him do not encompass my knowledge of him.  Knowing him emerged as we forged a life together—a life filled with ups and downs, with challenges and opportunities—and with the intimate knowing that grew only through sharing life together.  Real knowledge emerged when I stopped looking at my husband and began to look through him—understanding the world through his perspective, seeing the world through his eyes.  Knowing him and loving him became inseparable realities.

The knowledge that can arise in a marriage relationship is a helpful picture for understanding the phrase "truth is a person."  Truth is not simply arriving at all the right facts about a subject, nor is it exclusively contained within the world of philosophical systems, theological constructs, or clever argumentation.  When the author of Hebrews explains that "in these last days God has spoken to us in the Son," there is the underlying assumption that this person is God's definitive Word to humanity—God's truth revealed in the person of Jesus.(1)  When we know Jesus, we know the truth, and that truth is bound up in the very person of Jesus.

The temptation, of course, is to equate knowledge with facts about someone or something.  When we think we know certain things about someone or certain ideas about something, we think we know the truth.  This kind of knowledge breeds arrogance, as the apostle Paul suggests in 1 Corinthians 8:1-3.  "If anyone supposes that he knows anything, he has not yet known as he ought to know; but if anyone loves God, he is known by God."  How does one come to love God?  Is it by accumulating doctrines and principles and ideas about God?  Or is it by knowing God in the person of Jesus in unfolding relationship?  Knowledge, Paul suggests, is bound up in love for God.  More than knowing the facts about the God revealed in Jesus, love for God gives us a way of knowing that colors our vision, informs our living, and penetrates our very being.  We come to know the truth as a result of love.  And as we truly know Jesus, just as in any relationship, we begin to see the world through the eyes of the beloved.

My husband no longer has long hair, and he rarely dons his Yankees cap.  These two "facts" that identified him to me long ago no longer reflect the knowledge I now have of him.  I've learned a great deal about him in the sixteen years of our life together.  Granted, my knowledge of my husband encompasses certain "facts" I know about him, but truly knowing him comes from loving him.  In the same way, truly knowing God comes in loving God; indeed, as we love God "we are known by God" in return.  In this sense, we have a new understanding and are on our way to a new definition of knowledge as love.  As N.T. Wright has written about the search for knowledge, "We might perhaps expect that in studying Jesus himself we would find the clue to understanding not only the object we can see through the telescope, the voice we can hear on the telephone, but the nature of sight and hearing themselves.  Studying Jesus, in other words, might lead to a reappraisal of the theory of knowledge itself."(2)

Indeed, knowing Jesus means loving Jesus, and loving Jesus alters the nature of knowledge from simply being the pursuit of an object to the transformation of the subject itself.  With knowledge as love, we stop looking at Jesus, and start living through him.

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Hebrews 1:2
(2) N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 96.